Breaking Guppi News

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

As many of you may have noticed, Guppi development pretty much ground
to a halt this summer.  Nothing has really been done to the code in
CVS other than an occasional attempt to keep the stagnant code base
compilable.  Even this effort has been unsuccessful, since I know that
guppi2 has problems with the recent-vintage bonobo and with guile
1.3.4.

Anyway, I'm pleased to announce that Guppi development has resumed ---
though it has taken a somewhat unexpected turn.

After spending several weeks carefully studying the guppi2 code, I
unilaterally decided that the most expeditious course would be to
start again with a revised design.  Starting anew thankfully isn't the
same as starting from scratch: Havoc had some really nice stuff in
guppi2, from which I have borrowed freely.

I've also decided to dump C++.  The third incarnation of Guppi is
being written strictly in C.  I personally like C++, but it seems to
be a big turn-off for too many people.  I'm more than happy to work in
C, and it should hopefully expand the pool of potential contributors.
(An added side effect is that, by working in C, I've finally come to
see just how cool the gtk+ object system is.)

I've checked a semi-big chunk of very preliminary, very incomplete
code into CVS as "guppi3".  It should be a much easier build than
before --- you don't need any extra libraries beyond all of the usual
Gnome stuff.  If you've fully installed Gnome via the RPMs or the
Debian packages, "./autogen.sh; ./configure; make" should be all it
takes.

Now I've been working on guppi3 on and off for about a month now.  The
good news is that it can actually do a few little things: I've
re-implemented the key parts of goose in C (and it all came out much
nicer, thanks to gtk+'s more flexible object model), built a pretty
spiffy data importer system, and hacked out some basic plotting stuff
that uses cleaner and more efficient algorithms than those used in
guppi2.  I've also got guile bindings for lots of the data-related
functionality.  My ultimate goal is for Guppi to be 100% scriptable.

The bad news: as it currently exists in CVS, you can load data into
the system, and you can look at it with a (very primitive, to be
replaced) data browsing tool... but you can't plot anything.  Since
Guppi is a plotting program, this has to be considered a major gap in
its functionality. :-)

There is also no support for:
  * any plotting of anything --- since Guppi is, after all, a plotting
    program, this has to be considered a major gap in its
    functionality.  (Actually, there is some code there --- it just
    isn't hooked into the main app yet.)
  * bonobo/componentization (I haven't looked at that stuff before,
    and have no clue how it works),
  * printing (not that guppi2 had it, either)
  * session management or any of that other nice gnome stuff
  * any kind of on-line help or any documentation.  Which probably isn't a
    shock to anyone.
 
Having just gotten Guppi to the point where you could load data into
it, my next goal is to get some simple plotting in place.  Still, I'd
encourage interested parties to cvs co guppi3 and give it a try.  It
would be nice to know if it builds properly on different platforms.

Also, if you are feeling really ambitious, you could try playing with
the data importer.  It is designed to peek at a delimited data file and
"automagically" figure out where the data is in that file, what kind
of delimiter separates columns of data, what type of data each column
contains, if there are descriptive titles on the columns, etc.  I've
included some sample data files to try out --- you might want to try
out your own.

We are still far from the point where I'd consider releasing a guppi3
tarball, but I'm hoping to keep up some momentum on the project.  I'll
make an effort to issue periodic status reports via this mailing list.

Hopefully the third time will indeed be the charm for Guppi. :-)

-JT

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